Mars Needs Nitrogen

chat · 2005-05-18 05:05:51

Reb,

The balloon idea might also work at the gas giants since you would have an abundant supply of hydrogen as transport fuel.

Just modify the same idea as the Venus one, but include some oxygen tanks to mix with the hydrogen you collect and a thruster system left in orbit that is the transport system.
When the balloons arrive in orbit the gas is compressed for the trip to mars.

With the mainly co2 you collect from Venus, and the mainly hydrogen you collect from the gas giants you have a formula for teraforming mars with great precision.

mars2015 · 2005-05-18 12:17:53

Nitrogen is much rarer than water or CO2 in this universe, so anything you crash into Mars will bring maybe 100 times as much water and CO2 to Mars as nitrogen. I doubt you'll get enough nitrogen to Mars that way without making it a water planet (or maybe a glacier planet!).
-- RobS

Is there another gas we could use instead? I know we need some Nitrogen for plants, but could Argon or something serve as a buffer gas?

Dook · 2005-05-18 15:41:15

Please read all the previous posts about obtaining nitrogen, or any gas, from a gas giant, or venus, the moon, or wherever and shipping it to mars.

While not impossible it would require millions of trips from a giant transport ship. It's clearly not something we could ever do.

chat · 2005-05-18 17:59:15

Dook,

But only 1 trip for a million balloons.

Actually only 1/2 the balloons from each destination will suffice, much less if mars is not to exactly resemble earth.

If the balloons are each a mile in diameter only a few hundred from each destination should serve to teraform mars.

Well a few trips anyway.

Dook · 2005-05-18 19:51:42

Copied from RobS earlier post:

Regarding the masses of gas needed for creating a dense atmosphere, think of the problem this way:

1. The earth's atmosphere has about 10 tonnes of gas above every single square meter of the planet's surface. That's the mass necessary to produce a pressure of 1000 millibars (1 bar, which equals 10 tonnes per square meter).

2. On Mars, with 0.38 gravity (rounded here to 0.4 for convenience), one would need about 25 tonnes per square meter to produce the same pressure (because pressure is mass per square meter times gravity).

3. Mars has about 125 million square kilometers and a square kilometer has 1 million square meters, so Mars has a surface area of 125 million million (125 trillion) square meters.

4. To produce 10% of a terrestrial atmospheric pressure on Mars, we will need 2.5 tonnes of gas per square meter, or 2.5 x 125 = 312.5 trillion tonnes of gas.

5. To help you visualize the quantity involved, if the gas were condensed to a liquid with the same density as water, it would occupy 312.5 trillion cubic meters, which would require a sphere 7000 meters (7 kilometers) in diameter.

Copied from Karov's earlier post:
So, if we assume ~300 milibars of N2 ( or even less 250 milibars of N2 ~1/3 the earth`s one) for Mars + ~200 milibars of O2 ( or even 100-150 milibars of O2 , which are absolutely tolerable by standard humans` organisms for full-life cycle habitation as the upper Andes` example quotes), or totally about 400 milibars ( 250 N2/150 O2) - than under 1/3th gees and with 1/3th earths planetary surface - we`d need 1/3th of the earth`s nitrogen quantity imported on Mars: i.e. 1.27 exp 15 tonnes.

Your half a million lbs, should mean about 250 metric tonnes for each shipping tank. Say, 1270 tonnes per each delivery unit cargo, gives us ONE TRILLION ships. Not so much!!!

It really is a virtually impossible task.

karov · 2005-05-19 02:11:19

It is not "virtually impossible task" to produce such or bigger quantities of any commodity ( in the case together with their shipping to desired destinaton).

Example the terran bilogica;l systems. Approach - exponential growth in number.

Remember the old Freeman Dyson`s article about the self-replicating material automata ( as I remember entitled "Thought experiments" - I don`t know the original title, caus I have it in Bulgarian edition from the middle 1980s). In this article Dyson describes SRSystem consisting of only one probe, whic is rocketed to Enceladus, where it using the not so sparse solar energy begins to replicate itself in numerous solarsail-boats each able to bring less than 1 m3 of water ice, spiraling out of the Saturn`s gravity well, and than self-guiding itself to collision course with Mars. Looked from outside the Saturn ring will literally double for a while ( several decades), and the billions and billions of solar-sails, after full dissasembly of Enceladus will bring its mass (a full-scale ocean) on Mars, without giant rocket engines and giant impacts.

In this highly theoretical sence SRS could be used to extract ammonia from variuos bodies beyond the Ammonia ice line ( beyond Saturn`s orbit) and to deliver it where necessary. I can`t remember from how distant begins the ammonia ice line ( the water one is beyond 4 AU off-sun), but the outer system is littleally litered with icy solid bodies. Accoring to the explorations and the stimations - this "cometary" material as the moons of Saturn and Beyond is comprised of about 50% ices ( 90% H2O, 5% carbohydrates, 5% NH3) and 50% of "rocks" ( frosen mud of alumina and silica + tar-like substance called cerogen). 5% NH3 is not at all little quantity. It is not necessary to go exactly to the Kuipe disk area and distances. The Centaurs , qouted earlier in this thread are also numerous and some examples are >100 km in linear dimensions. If 5% NH3 is right assumption and we take into account only one 100 km dimater trans-Saturnian, than that means 200 000 km3 or 200 000 000 000 000 m3 of frozen ammonia ( by mass ratio) from a single object.

Take the Dook`s calcumlations ( and the economic version of mine with less N2) - this is pretty enough.

Further advantage - 5% oveall percentage of any material , makes the body piece of really rich ore.
The solar power - it is very weak there ~100 times less than in the earths vicinity, but don`t forget that the solar gravity diminishes with distant with exactly the same ratio.
0.8 grams per square metter areal density of ~100% reflecting solar sail means that it would hover onto the emited by the Sun radiation ANYWHERE in the System. The "rocks" in the body give us all the necessary alumninium for solar sail coating, the kerogen all the plastics to make the multi-trillion ships fleet. The Sun the energy - where the light is sparse - simply concentrate it. The solar sail concentrator could and would grow in area according to the demand of the production increase rate.

On Earth if we harness all the falling light from a square spot of 100 x 100 km wide, we`ll have all the nowaday world power production. 100 times more dispersed light would need only 1000x1000 km wide sail-mirror to harness this energy. The neglibile local gravity field will make the production of the reflecting cloth, as well the deployment easy.
The weakened by distance sola gravity means that the conteinerized one-way corgoes of solid NH3, could be easily canceled their orbital velocity and the fall time to the Inner system is decades.

Ammonia ice is les dence than the water one , so assuming 300 trillion m3 ammonia yeald from single Centaur asteroid, and one m3 per one-way ship ( actually solar-sail guided missile) we`d need 3x10exp14 "parcels". The ammonia in them could be kept frozen in the deeper orbits of Mars, Moon even Mercury via active solar power cooling and or good insolation ( aoerogel coating?). As the microorganisms in a culture dish will grow exponentially, at first, after the first microorganism appears (but then logistically until the available food is exhausted, when growth stops.

3x10exp14 - you calculate it in binary, take realistic duplicatio rate and you`ll have quite feasible time for fulfilling the task.

chat · 2005-05-19 04:29:16

Dook,

Robs math leaves little to argue about.
But the concept of mars initially needing 10% of earths 1 bar pressure does.

Probably 1% bar or 2% bar thicker atmosphere at mars would induce a runaway melt, drastically changing the bar pressure itself.

With the latest data on what is frozen on the poles of mars it might require no more water for a teraform, and no trips to the gas giants for hydrogen.

Since we would only be shipping 97% co2 and 3% nitrogen from Venus to mars its a totally different task and bar pressure of co2 to induce a runaway melt at mars, maybe much less that 1% bar.

Venus also is a much easier place to harvest balloons filled with gas, and virtually no thrust to get to collide with Mars since the solar sail of the balloon size can be used for transport.

Keep filling 1 mile diameter balloons until a small moon sized object is reached, then let the sun move it to mars.

No need for giant cargo ships or transport systems or infrastructure, just a good supply of big balloons and rope.

chat · 2005-05-19 04:33:56

Anyone want to try the math for a runaway melt with mars having a 97% co2 atmosphere import?

I bet the big balloon numbers are quite low.

mars2015 · 2005-05-19 08:08:46

If we were going to do this, I'd be much more interested in Venus' Nitrogen than it's CO2. We could use the CO2 but need the N2 even more. I wonder-is it possible to cool and condense out the CO2 leaving only the N2 (and maybe a little CO2) to Mars? Even though Venus has only 2.5% Nitrogen that's still enough for 700mb of Nitrogen on Mars and still over a bar on Venus for a future Venus terraform if we decided to go that route.

chat · 2005-05-19 18:25:30

mars2015,

For The first shipment or two the current Venus atmosphere sent to mars would be virtually perfect to add nitrogen and capture additional radiant heat from the co2.

As soon as the melt begins at mars a shipment can be refined with just nitrogen gas to bolster the nitrogen content at mars.

Will mars ever be a place a human can walk on the surface without extra oxygen?
Probably not, so the nitrogen content at mars only needs to be what plants require.(if plants will even grow on a teraformed mars)

karov · 2005-05-21 03:10:48

The venusian-baloon idea:
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of course it is possible via osmosys or destilation to exract the plentifull N2 from venusian atmosphere and to put it in enormous gas bags. We have both the energy ( >2 Kwatts/m2 of solar power ) and the materials ( the atmosphere content itself) an the working site for deploying the industrial power for such task - the upper 50-60 km above the hot surface where both the temperature and pressure are in the earthlike range.
An advantage is that, carbon nanotubes mesh used for walls of the baloons, could be adjusted to let only N2 to come in the baloons, and that such N2 filled baloon will be lighter than the ambient atmosphere and would float up.

A weak point I see here the "slight nudge" to orbit such baloons. Actually 1 km3 of N2 at ~1 bar pressure would weight about 1000 000 tonnes. If we chose smaller and smaller baloons than the wall mass to cargo mass ratio increases. We face here several things which should be balanced:
1. The baloon cloth should be light enough to be economical the operation.
2. It should be strong, i.e. heavy enough to allow orbiting
3. It shoulg be light enough for solar sailing...
4. It should be heavy enough to not burst in space due to the high internal pressure

Other, what kind of reaction mass, i.e. "fuel" you use to push the baloons to low-venusian orbit, aside of the usefull N2 they contain?

I think an elaborated concept like this is feasible to use the Venusian N2 stockpile, without to include into the equation, exporting N2 balanced via orbital ring mechanism in dynamical sence with say importing hydrogen:

Pack the extracted N2 in very thin baloons, but under pressure of several milibars only. Such way the baloons will float higher than the 1 bar layer - actually perhaps to ~100 km of ground. 0.01 bars mean that one km3 baloon will contain cargo with mass of only 10 000 tonnes of N2, and may have sufficient area-to mass ratio. Such fragile things is impossible to be rocketed in orbit, asside that the necessary rocket fuel increases the weight. But could be lifted up there with rotavators ( no - sinchronous skyhooks). Make the baloons in pancake shape in order to face bigger area for solar sailing - the carbon buckies walls make perfect absorbtion type of solar sail. Inflatable sail. Let the solar photon flux to ship the things up, maneuvring so that to hit Mars... or Moon whatever.

The entire such approach will have too little productivity. The system`s productivity will be limited to the rotation rate of the skyhooks. The size of the skyhook and the hight ( i.e. lenhgt) of their park orbit will limit the number of the rotavators. One N2 package of 10exp4 tonnes still means hundreds of billions baloons to be delivered. Imagine 100 rotavators ( too many!!!) with rotation period of one hour ( too big acceleration which the pancakes will not survive!!!), than we`ll be able to orbit only 100 baloons per hour, or about 8000-9000 a year... Millions of years for N2 venusian excavation.

The other version - if the baloons self-rocket themselves in orbit using CO2 as propelant and solar power, a 1 km3 pancake with say 1 km2 of collection area will have , assuming the impossible 100% efficiency in turning the solar power in reactive motion, 2 000 000 KWatts of power for lifting 10 000 tonnes of N2. This is less than one horse power per kilogram, worse achievement than normal car, and something that never will bring you to orbit, no matter the constant power supply.The used now rockets on Earth, have such power of the million Kws range and hardly lift several dozens of tonnes in LEO.

Perhubs, the feasible way to excavate the huge CO2/N2 venusian blanket entirelly is to use what we discussed a year ago: Use combination of enormous laser and particle beam to ionize and accelerate the air from a spot over Venus, the resulting plasma plume collect via hovering plasma beam rider statite, where you process the constituents and sale them on the open system market.

chat · 2005-05-22 04:13:25

karov,

Lots of food for thought in your post.

The big balloon idea has lots of potential as a transport vehicle, but it's not a great system for removing the gas from the atmosphere.

With a combination of local heating to eject gas and a collection vehicle in space the big balloons structure can be designed for just the trip and not the escape.
Good idea on the shape of the balloons, a flat balloon will be pushed well by the solar wind.

I even gave some thought to using the balloons at low pressure with a laser to heat the balloon for the push to space.
Looks almost possible, but the design of the balloon material under high heat becomes much more complex.

still getting mars to 1 bar with balloons would take way to long, but 1% or 2% of earth pressure to start the mars melt might be only 1000 - 10000 balloons.
Tough to get a real good idea on that number as no one is sure what a 97% co2 import would do at mars for heating, and at what point a melt would start, and what would be released in a melt.

Since the Venusian atmosphere is mostly co2 it will serve well as a green house gas at mars, so not much point in distilling or freezing it to all of anything particular.
Just import the 97% co2 and 2.5 % nitrogen as is.

The sticking point seems to be how to escape the gas from Venus easily.
The heating idea we discussed might be the way.
Then some really big balloons could be made for just the trip.

karov · 2005-05-24 01:14:01

Chat,

So - here may be the right combination of techs for exporting venusian atmosphere en mass:
-----------------------------------------------------------
1. Orbiting via plasming: Venus is close to the Sun enough so aerial lense to concentrate enough light without need of soletta. I mean aerial lense as the described by Paul Birch for regolith pyrolysis in "Terraform Mars Quickly" ( http://www.paulbirch.net]www.paulbirch.net - there are ilustrations). If we create from asteroidal material huge ( say ~100x100 km wide fresnel reflector lense) and carefully try to "land" it, i.e. put it in trajectory so to focus on the middle layers of the venusian atmosphere the incoming through it light, in principle we coul achieve high enough tempeature... but the laser is better choise. It is not restricted as the solar concentrator in maximum heat to the temperature of the light source. So the mini-soletta concentrated light should be turned in very conversion efficient beam of UV or X-ray`s laser, which to ram a narrow spot in the venusian atmosphere. The given for example 100x100 km collector, yields 20 000 000 000 kW of power in venusian orbit. Conservative 10% efficiency in turning the rough sun light into coherent UV or X-rays ( the working frequency EMR will be chosen so that will give the perfect ionisation of CO2 + N2) means that we could concentrate on say 1x1 km area the energy equivalent of 5 kilotonnes nuclear bomb exploding every second. The lasering of the spot ( it may occur that it is good to chose tangential angle of the light fall), will generate constantly erupting plume of hot mainly CON plasma + some H ans S from the H2SO4 in the clouds. The eruption will be roughly spherical in appearance, but the upward plasma streams could be harnesed via mag-sail or rather beamrider statite. This platform will collect much of the plasma concentrating it with magnetic means and will harvest both the material, and the momentum of the plasma plume in order to stay there counter the gravity. The cooled and distiled through this stage plasma constituents, would be directed to other higher array of platforms, this time in orbit arround Venus, preferably at the frindge of its gravity dominance sphere. In the orbital platforms array the C will be used for constructional material of containing devices and the O2 and N2 will be shipped in these containers. 5 kilotones per second is similar to something like 100 tonnes per second of atmosphere orbited via only one working such device. The device would grow incrementally so to turn into complete parasol or even to deploy further allong the venusian orbit and around using only the materials from the venusian atmosphere + solar power.

The plasma capture system could work like this: http://www.iase.cc/accelerator.htm]http … erator.htm

2. Perhubs - good example for gas container is http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aerogel]ht … ki/Aerogel -- with C we could build even better and more robust dendritic structure, and the gas pressure in the gel could be even higher - remember R.Freitas and his respirocites with 1000 bars of internal pressure.
Make enormous 'pancake" of "carbogel" filled with N2 and /or O2. The blackness of the carbon makes perfect absorbtion type solar sails. The pancake stiff foam sails could be build from uniform 1 cm3 blocks for example. The bulk of the material allows from the carbon to be manifactured and build in quite sophisticated guidance and navigation systems. The unused or waiting purchase C+N2 pancake sails can be delivered to stand by orbits - some libration points, etc.

This way venus could be lasered untill it is completely devoted of atmosphere, and during this phase, ctually even from the very first moment, Venus would be exporter of valuable stuff to whereever it is in demand. 100-200 mBars to Mars, to the Moon, etc, + material for the construction and the volatilization of many millions of km long 1000 km wide terraformed rotating tube...

chat · 2005-05-24 03:54:45

karov,

It has some definite plusses to the idea.
While most of the atmosphere of Venus is in orbit it can be reworked, and only the useful compounds sent back.

Of course mars would be teraformed long before Venus, but the 2 for 1 idea of 2 teraformed worlds or more for the price of 1 is very appealing.

The only asteroids flying around the inner solar system would be giant gas bags, so if an unforeseen problem occurred its simple to destroy one.

Its an efficient way to teraform as the power and infrastructure requirements are both low, and the time scales in much shorter periods.

Building the balloon/casing material from the Venusian atmosphere is also a big plus as it requires you to take just the machine to process and produce the material, and not the material itself.

Its within the tech reach of today so it must be a viable plan.

Since all that gas would be orbiting Venus i wonder how difficult it would be to use a particle beam to simply send gas to mars with no package.
It should be possible to directly send it to mars with no container.
The focal length of the beam would be the only real problem to the idea, but lots of free power at Venus to power a particle beam, and quite a big target.

karov · 2005-05-25 03:00:49

Of course mars would be teraformed long before Venus, but the 2 for 1 idea of 2 teraformed worlds or more for the price of 1 is very appealing.
Since all that gas would be orbiting Venus i wonder how difficult it would be to use a particle beam to simply send gas to mars with no package.
It should be possible to directly send it to mars with no container.
The focal length of the beam would be the only real problem to the idea, but lots of free power at Venus to power a particle beam, and quite a big target.

If we are able to remove the Venusian atmosphere in several centuries using similar to the described method - than the terraformation of Mars and Venus will be essentially simultaneous.

Indeed- for me the more important part is that using the excessive amount of carbon and oxigen we can build tube-wold colony of THOUSANDS of times the earth area. So actually the Terraformation of Mars and Venus will be just several thousandth parts of the whole profit of the operation.

Package to deliver the stuff is necessary. The naked ions have very low balistic coefficient, they`ll miss the target. They`ll hit the Earth. Casing is unavoidable , even if we consider nano-scale of the distinct packages.

Stormrage · 2005-06-27 15:34:39

One question. Is there an asteroid small enough but has enough ammonia to produce the neccessary nitrogen to give is the minimum milibars needed or even 1 bar with out taking years (with that i mean 10+ years) for everything to happen.

Dook · 2005-06-27 18:54:27

From a previous topic titled: Comet Crashing

If we were to direct a comet into mars to create heat, increase it's mass, and add water and hopefully nitrogen, the comet Churyumov-Gasimenko might just be the best choice.

It's orbit inclination is only 7.12 degrees and takes it across mars orbit. This comet makes a return every 6.57 years so we just need to pick the best time then speed it up. It is 2 miles wide by 3 miles long.

Not sure how much ammonia this comet would provide but I bet it would be little more than a swimming pool amount poured into an empty Atlantic Ocean.

Mace · 2005-07-18 16:01:49

I have been looking into various forms of diving gear such as rebreathers. The amount of nitrogen needed to cover the planet would be enormous but maybe we could supply each person with their own "little air bubble" of nitrogen. Each time they breath out, the carbon dioxide will be filtered out and pure oxygen will be filtered in from the surrounding environment or a small tank maybe. Thus people could walk on the surface of Mars with a snorkel or mouthpiece type object? without a spacesuit (assuming an atmosphere of some sort is made with suitable pressure).

srmeaney · 2005-07-22 17:34:34

Which Mars elements do we decay to achieve nitrogen?

simplesimon · 2005-07-23 08:09:00

If you care to visit my site, http://www.livingonmars.tk]www.livingonmars.tk , i have attempted to answer all questions related to the exploration and terraformation of Mars. If you feel that you may have content for the site that would be useful to include, could you please e-mail me at: uwais_ilyas1@hotmail.com, or alternatively, you could post your suggestions in this forum.

:idea: :?: :idea:

srmeaney · 2005-07-23 10:57:33

Interesting. Design it yourself? I suggest Mechanisto for a 3-D lander and smoke it with a dust storm... looks good, Probably need a few bits on Fuel Cell tech and all the products producable- Try contacting one of the big companies like CIG. They might be able to tell you what they can make.

Then there was that guy who invented an oxygen/hydrogen welder oxytorch that works tapwater through a fuelcell. They bought up his invention overnight.

Stormrage · 2005-07-23 15:21:04

I just had an idea. You guys have been saying lets crash a asteroid into Mars. Well i think it would take to long for Mars to be fit for human habitation if we did that. Why not explode a nuke on the asteroid near the planet. The fragments will hit the planet more spaced out.

chat · 2005-07-23 18:59:04

Stormrage,

An even better idea than nuking anything is .......
Collide two asteroids or comets into each other in low mars orbit.

Nearly all the impact devastation is avoided, but all the elements still arrive to mars, and no nukes needed at all.

I also toyed with a similar idea at Venus, but collisions in geo orbit to act as a near permanent sun shade to cool Venus.
(Venus is a more hands on project afterwards though)

simplesimon · 2005-07-24 06:20:18

Interesting. Design it yourself? I suggest Mechanisto for a 3-D lander and smoke it with a dust storm... looks good, Probably need a few bits on Fuel Cell tech and all the products producable- Try contacting one of the big companies like CIG. They might be able to tell you what they can

All of the website was designed by me- using Dreamweaver and freewebs. Apart from the chatroom and forum on it, the coding is all mine. Thanks for the review and the advice, i'll try to follow up your suggestions. Meanwhile, would you mind signing up to the forum on the site- its not very big, but it will grow with more members- maybe you could direct some of your friends to the site? thanks again.

srmeaney · 2005-07-28 00:18:47

If mars is producing methane,

http://www.astrobio.net/news/modules.ph … =0&thold=0

doesnt that mean it has nitrogen.

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